S0.0 - TotalInvest: 20914, Sell&Buys: 439, ShortestInvest: 1, ShortestCash: 1 S0.0025 - TotalInvest: 20923, Sell&Buys: 319, ShortestInvest: 1, ShortestCash: 1 S0.005 - TotalInvest: 20887, Sell&Buys: 249, ShortestInvest: 1, ShortestCash: 1 S0.0075 - TotalInvest: 20808, Sell&Buys: 215, ShortestInvest: 1, ShortestCash: 1 S0.01 - TotalInvest: 20774, Sell&Buys: 183, ShortestInvest: 1, ShortestCash: 1 S0.0125 - TotalInvest: 20728, Sell&Buys: 153, ShortestInvest: 1, ShortestCash: 1 S0.015 - TotalInvest: 20701, Sell&Buys: 133, ShortestInvest: 1, ShortestCash: 1 S0.0175 - TotalInvest: 20712, Sell&Buys: 117, ShortestInvest: 4, ShortestCash: 4 S0.02 - TotalInvest: 20637, Sell&Buys: 109, ShortestInvest: 2, ShortestCash: 5 S0.0225 - TotalInvest: 20708, Sell&Buys: 101, ShortestInvest: 5, ShortestCash: 5 S0.025 - TotalInvest: 20713, Sell&Buys: 89, ShortestInvest: 5, ShortestCash: 5 S0.0275 - TotalInvest: 20807, Sell&Buys: 81, ShortestInvest: 15, ShortestCash: 14 S0.03 - TotalInvest: 20806, Sell&Buys: 75, ShortestInvest: 27, ShortestCash: 14 S0.0325 - TotalInvest: 20899, Sell&Buys: 69, ShortestInvest: 19, ShortestCash: 14 S0.035 - TotalInvest: 20775, Sell&Buys: 67, ShortestInvest: 33, ShortestCash: 14 S0.0375 - TotalInvest: 20827, Sell&Buys: 65, ShortestInvest: 33, ShortestCash: 14 S0.04 - TotalInvest: 20986, Sell&Buys: 61, ShortestInvest: 42, ShortestCash: 14 S0.0425 - TotalInvest: 21212, Sell&Buys: 59, ShortestInvest: 42, ShortestCash: 14 S0.045 - TotalInvest: 21457, Sell&Buys: 55, ShortestInvest: 126, ShortestCash: 44 S0.0475 - TotalInvest: 21501, Sell&Buys: 55, ShortestInvest: 126, ShortestCash: 45 S0.05 - TotalInvest: 21538, Sell&Buys: 55, ShortestInvest: 115, ShortestCash: 56 

To support more of my free daily analysis, and to see more stock specific analysis and updates, please join Tradingedge.
ANALYSIS:

• Yesterday we saw market dump towards the End of the day, before recovering from the 5280 level, where there was strong gamma. This dump was due to the bond auction, 2 year and 5 year, which saw weak dead which had bond yields rising.
• This morning, markets are lower again, continuing that trend, as bond yields continue lower and VIX jumps to 14.
• VIX positioning is still bearish, so I would expect that jump in VIX to pare, but we can see slightly more pullback first, so be slightly more cautious right now.
• On oil:
• Oil - flat today, has recovered back to 80 level on WTI. This is key resistance. Break above this is bullish short term. Skew has pointed to bounce for some time even as price action dropped. On Oil, I see a possible seasonal summer bounce before probably heading lower after that.
• DOw Jones Positioning update: because of airlines down this morning, we see down jones skew point lower. Calls on 40k are still very much there, so will expect bounce up later, but first it has to find support. First it will try at 38.5k, as strong put wall there. if breaks, will try bounce at 38k.
• Sbux update. Jumped to 80, rejected as we see very strong put delta there which makes resistance. Because of this, we will likely head lower, back to the 75 level where strong call delta should give support. Looking at options contracts a lot in range of 75 and 80, puts and calls.
• Gold lower today but positionally, we see traders buying calls OTM. It looks to me like its probably short term vol ahead of gdp and pce. Silver positioning more bullish but needs macro help to break ATH.
• Nvda down in premarket ad skew points more bearish. This is on profit taking. Traders selling covered calls. Can pullback slightly but Not expecting big dump because v strong positioning ITM.
  
• DATA LEDE: Australia Monthly CPI indicator came out at 3.6% vs 3.4% forecast. Last months reading was 3.5%
  
• So inflation is reaccelerating this month in Australia. RBA was hawkish last month already, so can expect more hawkishness.
  
• Japanese Consumer confidence comes out at lowest reading since November 2023.
  
• German consumer confidence numbers came out at highest level in over a year. Better than forecast. Still negative, but least negative in over a year.
  
• US mortgage numbers - applications down WOW, Mortgage rates up WOW.
  
• German Inflation Rate comes in line on YOY
  
• On monthly came softer.
  
• The Germany regional CPI came in at 0-0.1% MOM across the board, lower than expected.
  
• Richmond Fed manufacturing Index
  

MARKETS:

• Futures are lwoer as treasury yields rise. They were rising into the end of yesterdays trading session, due to weak 2year and 5 year bond auction. We see this continue.
• Nasdaq pulls back as NVDA takes a breather.
• Long end of yield curve rising, 10Y bond yields much higher.
• SPX pulls back to 5275 level this morning as treasury yields rise, and as airlines struggle this morning. Dropped yesterday to 5280 after bond auction, before pushing back to close at 5308. This morning has dropped again as yields rise, back to 5275.
• Nasdaq meanwhile hit new records yesterday, dragged up by the 7% move in NVDA. Rose to 18,900. Today, gives back those gains, down 0.7% at 18,750.
• Dow Jones: Down at 38,610. Will try to find support at 38,500, and if it fails there, then 38k, before bounce. Still seeing calls on 40k.
• GER40: Lower again to 18,530. Looking for support around this 18,500 level where it found support on Thursday. Otherwise drop to around 18,410.
• FTSE - down for 6th day in a row. Back to 8200. Down from 8479 before. Down 3.3%.
• HKG50: Down again, by 1.3%. Chinese market pulling back after almost hitting 20k 2 weeks ago. Now down 7%. Goldman Calls it a buying opportunity. In and around 18k it probably is.
• GOLD: lower today as Dollar pushes higher.
• Oil - flat, has recovered back to 80 level on WTI. This is key resistance. Break above this is bullish.
• On Oil, I see a seasonal summer bounce before probably heading lower after that.
• VIX: Jumps to 14 today. Can see vol crush later. Volatility positioning still bearish. Lots of puts on VIX.

EARNINGS:
DKS

• EPS of 3.3 beat estimates of 2.98 by 10.7%
• Revenue of 3.02B beat estimates by 2.7%, up 6.2% YOY
• Comparable sales growth was 5.3%
• Opened 4 new stores in Q1

RAISED THEIR GUIDANCE for full year

• EPS now 13.35-13.75 (raised by 4%), ahead of estimates
• Revenue of 13.1-13.2B more or less in line with estimates
• Comparable sales growth raised to 2-3% from 1-2%
• Said product pipeline from key brand partners has Never been better
• Significant momentum nd more differentiated products
• Said continues to expect robust demand.
• Raised full year outlook as comp improving, driving momentum in the business.

CAVA - strong earnings, but stock is trading very high right now, hence why market reaction is still lower despite good quarter.

• EPS of 0.12 smashed estimates of 0.04
• Revenue of 249M was up 28% YOY and beat estimates of 245.9M
• Restaurant comp sales were up 2.3%. So each restaurant branch is growing too, as well as number of branches.
• RAISED FY 2024 guidance:
• Same restaurant sales growth expected to now be 4.5-6.5% yOY, up from 3-5%
• EBITDA expected to be higher at 100-105M, up from 86-92M
• Restaurant profit margin now expected to be 23.7-24.3%, up from 22.7-23.3%
• Opened 14 new restaurants. Is investing in scalable infrastructure.

MAG 7:

• AAPL - Bank of America reiterates Apple as a top pick and maintains buy rating with a Price Target of 230. Said they view AI enabled iPhones to drive multi year upgrade cycle.
• AAPL - opening first store in Malaysia as Asian expansion continues.
• MSFT - PWC will become OPenAi’s largest chatGPT enterprise customer. OpenAI has signed a reseller deal with pWC. PWC will roll out enterprise version of ChatGPT to 100k employees.

OTHER COMPANIES:

• Airlines are lower after AAL cuts EPS guidance in Q2 and announce COO departure.
• They lowered EPS forecast for next quarter to 1-1.15, vs 1.15-1.45 before. So Cut by 18% at midpoint.
• They said this is because of a 6% decline in total revenue per available seat mile.
• They lowered operating margin forecast to 8.5-10.5% vs 9.5-11.5% before.
• In contrast, UAL reaffirmed Q2 adjusted EPS outlook of 3.75-4.25, but is trading down in sentiment.
• UAL gets an upgrade as a result from Jefferies, raising to Buy, with price target of 65 from 54.
• HOOD announced a $1 billion share repurchase program, expected to be executed over a two to three-year period starting in Q3 2024
• DKS pumps on earnings.
• ASO up in sentiment with DKS.
• CHWY up on earnings. Beat EPS and revenue. AAP up - missed sales estimate but beat EPS estimate for this quarter. But is up because whilst they reaffirmed EPS estimates, in line with expectations (or sightly ahead), they raised top end of sales guidance from 11.3-11.4 to 11.3-11.5. This was ahead of expectations.
• Merck will acquire Eyebio for up to $3B. This biotech startup will be acquired for 1.3B in cash, and 1.7B based on milestone achievements. Eyebio is a clinical stage company with US and UK operations, for eye diseases.
• Uber will offer seine river cruises during 2024 Paris olympics. This is a measure to accommodate increased demand during the 2024 Paris Olympics, including free Seine river cruises.
• MRO - Up in premarket as COP is in advanced talks with acquire MRO in deal valuing the company at just over $15B valuation.
• COP lower on this.
• Box slightly higher on better than expected earnings
• MCHP - announced plans to raise 1.1B in convertible senior notes due 2030, hence why stock price is down.
• BHP - Anglo Ameircan rejects their last minute bid to increase their bid in takeover talks.
• HUBS jumped yesterday as David Faber on CNBC yesterday highlighted that there are talks ongoing with GOOGL for acquisition.
• FSLR - UBS raises price target to 350 from 270, buy rating. Cited a more supportive pricing environment as key reason.
• GEELY - Chinas Geely launching hybrids with more fuel efficient engines.
• VINFAST - considers delaying $4B US plant.
• HES - Shareholders signed off on 53B sale to Chevron
• JPM explosion at Ohio Building. Carrying out safety checks.
• Volskwagen will be developing low cost EV cars to tackle chinese rivals, Such as XPEV and Nio.
• FMC is up as they obtain registration in Brazil for 2 herbicides, powered by Isoflex Active.
• PLTR - ETN depends partnership with Palantir to enhance AI use in operations
• Oil stocks higher as oil up
• Meme stocks pullback.
• Solar stocks pullback after big run up.
• Chinese stocks are lower.

OTHER NEWS:

• Yesterday, 2 year and 5 year note auction were both weak. It had a 1.3 BPS tail (biggest since Jan); Dealers' take was 19.52% vs. the historical average of 15%
• Auctions didn't go well—meaning there wasn't as much demand, so the government had to offer higher yields to sell them.
• This weak demand is what caused the market reaction later in the day.
• ING says that following the bad Australia inflation data, that they are 1 more bad inflation print away from removing the final cut they have pencilled in for Q4 this year. 2 more bad prints, and they think its possible RBA might hike.
• RBC says that S&P500 is fairly valued and traders should take a more neutral stance.
• China is investing $820M in all solid state battery research and development. This technology is key for next gen of electric vehicles. Battery makers such as CATL will get gov support.
• IMF upgrades China’s growth forecast to 5% on strong Q1 and policy measures. Raised from 4.6% before. IMF said more comprehensive measures are needed still, atlhgouh current measures are promising.
• Goldman Sachs says that with the HKG50 market rally stalling, this represents a buying opportunity for the market.
• OpenAI has signed a reseller deal with pWC. PWC will roll out enterprise version of ChatGPT to 100k employees.
• Cathie Woods Ark invests in Elon Musk’s XAI. Investment is a 2% portion of Ark Venture Fund.
• 25% of consumers use Buy now Pay later for purchases.
• South Korea and UAE sign economic partnership agreement.
• BOJ’s Adachi says that fast rate increases will risk Japan economy. Says he expects inflation to accelerate from Summer due to weak yen.
• Whilst AAL guided to weaker EPS, generally, airline trends look strong. Memorial Day travel data looks very strong and 5 of the 10 busiest American airport travel days of all time have occurred in past 2 weeks.
• On the Singapore airline flight which saw turbulence, causing the death of a passenger, a probe found that the plane fell 54M in less than 5 seconds.
• China will likely focus on AI in their new Chip fund.
• Chicago is offering generous subsidies to convert obsolete office space into apartments and hotels, despite their own budgetary concerns.
• Israel has ben expanding their Rafah operations, evne as global uproar has been growing.

To support more of my free daily analysis, and to see more stock specific analysis and updates, please join Tradingedge.

ANALYSIS:

• Yesterday we saw market dump towards the End of the day, before recovering from the 5280 level, where there was strong gamma. This dump was due to the bond auction, 2 year and 5 year, which saw weak dead which had bond yields rising.
• This morning, markets are lower again, continuing that trend, as bond yields continue lower and VIX jumps to 14.
• VIX positioning is still bearish, so I would expect that jump in VIX to pare, but we can see slightly more pullback first, so be slightly more cautious right now.
• On oil:
• Oil - flat today, has recovered back to 80 level on WTI. This is key resistance. Break above this is bullish short term. Skew has pointed to bounce for some time even as price action dropped. On Oil, I see a possible seasonal summer bounce before probably heading lower after that.
• DOw Jones Positioning update: because of airlines down this morning, we see down jones skew point lower. Calls on 40k are still very much there, so will expect bounce up later, but first it has to find support. First it will try at 38.5k, as strong put wall there. if breaks, will try bounce at 38k.
• Sbux update. Jumped to 80, rejected as we see very strong put delta there which makes resistance. Because of this, we will likely head lower, back to the 75 level where strong call delta should give support. Looking at options contracts a lot in range of 75 and 80, puts and calls.
• Gold lower today but positionally, we see traders buying calls OTM. It looks to me like its probably short term vol ahead of gdp and pce. Silver positioning more bullish but needs macro help to break ATH.
• Nvda down in premarket ad skew points more bearish. This is on profit taking. Traders selling covered calls. Can pullback slightly but Not expecting big dump because v strong positioning ITM.
  
• DATA LEDE: Australia Monthly CPI indicator came out at 3.6% vs 3.4% forecast. Last months reading was 3.5%
  
• So inflation is reaccelerating this month in Australia. RBA was hawkish last month already, so can expect more hawkishness.
  
• Japanese Consumer confidence comes out at lowest reading since November 2023.
  
• German consumer confidence numbers came out at highest level in over a year. Better than forecast. Still negative, but least negative in over a year.
  
• US mortgage numbers - applications down WOW, Mortgage rates up WOW.
  
• German Inflation Rate comes in line on YOY
  
• On monthly came softer.
  
• The Germany regional CPI came in at 0-0.1% MOM across the board, lower than expected.
  
• Richmond Fed manufacturing Index
  

MARKETS:

• Futures are lwoer as treasury yields rise. They were rising into the end of yesterdays trading session, due to weak 2year and 5 year bond auction. We see this continue.
• Nasdaq pulls back as NVDA takes a breather.
• Long end of yield curve rising, 10Y bond yields much higher.
• SPX pulls back to 5275 level this morning as treasury yields rise, and as airlines struggle this morning. Dropped yesterday to 5280 after bond auction, before pushing back to close at 5308. This morning has dropped again as yields rise, back to 5275.
• Nasdaq meanwhile hit new records yesterday, dragged up by the 7% move in NVDA. Rose to 18,900. Today, gives back those gains, down 0.7% at 18,750.
• Dow Jones: Down at 38,610. Will try to find support at 38,500, and if it fails there, then 38k, before bounce. Still seeing calls on 40k.
• GER40: Lower again to 18,530. Looking for support around this 18,500 level where it found support on Thursday. Otherwise drop to around 18,410.
• FTSE - down for 6th day in a row. Back to 8200. Down from 8479 before. Down 3.3%.
• HKG50: Down again, by 1.3%. Chinese market pulling back after almost hitting 20k 2 weeks ago. Now down 7%. Goldman Calls it a buying opportunity. In and around 18k it probably is.
• GOLD: lower today as Dollar pushes higher.
• Oil - flat, has recovered back to 80 level on WTI. This is key resistance. Break above this is bullish.
• On Oil, I see a seasonal summer bounce before probably heading lower after that.
• VIX: Jumps to 14 today. Can see vol crush later. Volatility positioning still bearish. Lots of puts on VIX.

EARNINGS:
DKS

• EPS of 3.3 beat estimates of 2.98 by 10.7%
• Revenue of 3.02B beat estimates by 2.7%, up 6.2% YOY
• Comparable sales growth was 5.3%
• Opened 4 new stores in Q1

RAISED THEIR GUIDANCE for full year

• EPS now 13.35-13.75 (raised by 4%), ahead of estimates
• Revenue of 13.1-13.2B more or less in line with estimates
• Comparable sales growth raised to 2-3% from 1-2%
• Said product pipeline from key brand partners has Never been better
• Significant momentum nd more differentiated products
• Said continues to expect robust demand.
• Raised full year outlook as comp improving, driving momentum in the business.

CAVA - strong earnings, but stock is trading very high right now, hence why market reaction is still lower despite good quarter.

• EPS of 0.12 smashed estimates of 0.04
• Revenue of 249M was up 28% YOY and beat estimates of 245.9M
• Restaurant comp sales were up 2.3%. So each restaurant branch is growing too, as well as number of branches.
• RAISED FY 2024 guidance:
• Same restaurant sales growth expected to now be 4.5-6.5% yOY, up from 3-5%
• EBITDA expected to be higher at 100-105M, up from 86-92M
• Restaurant profit margin now expected to be 23.7-24.3%, up from 22.7-23.3%
• Opened 14 new restaurants. Is investing in scalable infrastructure.

MAG 7:

• AAPL - Bank of America reiterates Apple as a top pick and maintains buy rating with a Price Target of 230. Said they view AI enabled iPhones to drive multi year upgrade cycle.
• AAPL - opening first store in Malaysia as Asian expansion continues.
• MSFT - PWC will become OPenAi’s largest chatGPT enterprise customer. OpenAI has signed a reseller deal with pWC. PWC will roll out enterprise version of ChatGPT to 100k employees.

OTHER COMPANIES:

• Airlines are lower after AAL cuts EPS guidance in Q2 and announce COO departure.
• They lowered EPS forecast for next quarter to 1-1.15, vs 1.15-1.45 before. So Cut by 18% at midpoint.
• They said this is because of a 6% decline in total revenue per available seat mile.
• They lowered operating margin forecast to 8.5-10.5% vs 9.5-11.5% before.
• In contrast, UAL reaffirmed Q2 adjusted EPS outlook of 3.75-4.25, but is trading down in sentiment.
• UAL gets an upgrade as a result from Jefferies, raising to Buy, with price target of 65 from 54.
• HOOD announced a $1 billion share repurchase program, expected to be executed over a two to three-year period starting in Q3 2024
• DKS pumps on earnings.
• ASO up in sentiment with DKS.
• CHWY up on earnings. Beat EPS and revenue. AAP up - missed sales estimate but beat EPS estimate for this quarter. But is up because whilst they reaffirmed EPS estimates, in line with expectations (or sightly ahead), they raised top end of sales guidance from 11.3-11.4 to 11.3-11.5. This was ahead of expectations.
• Merck will acquire Eyebio for up to $3B. This biotech startup will be acquired for 1.3B in cash, and 1.7B based on milestone achievements. Eyebio is a clinical stage company with US and UK operations, for eye diseases.
• Uber will offer seine river cruises during 2024 Paris olympics. This is a measure to accommodate increased demand during the 2024 Paris Olympics, including free Seine river cruises.
• MRO - Up in premarket as COP is in advanced talks with acquire MRO in deal valuing the company at just over $15B valuation.
• COP lower on this.
• Box slightly higher on better than expected earnings
• MCHP - announced plans to raise 1.1B in convertible senior notes due 2030, hence why stock price is down.
• BHP - Anglo Ameircan rejects their last minute bid to increase their bid in takeover talks.
• HUBS jumped yesterday as David Faber on CNBC yesterday highlighted that there are talks ongoing with GOOGL for acquisition.
• FSLR - UBS raises price target to 350 from 270, buy rating. Cited a more supportive pricing environment as key reason.
• GEELY - Chinas Geely launching hybrids with more fuel efficient engines.
• VINFAST - considers delaying $4B US plant.
• HES - Shareholders signed off on 53B sale to Chevron
• JPM explosion at Ohio Building. Carrying out safety checks.
• Volskwagen will be developing low cost EV cars to tackle chinese rivals, Such as XPEV and Nio.
• FMC is up as they obtain registration in Brazil for 2 herbicides, powered by Isoflex Active.
• PLTR - ETN depends partnership with Palantir to enhance AI use in operations
• Oil stocks higher as oil up
• Meme stocks pullback.
• Solar stocks pullback after big run up.
• Chinese stocks are lower.

OTHER NEWS:

• Yesterday, 2 year and 5 year note auction were both weak. It had a 1.3 BPS tail (biggest since Jan); Dealers' take was 19.52% vs. the historical average of 15%
• Auctions didn't go well—meaning there wasn't as much demand, so the government had to offer higher yields to sell them.
• This weak demand is what caused the market reaction later in the day.
• ING says that following the bad Australia inflation data, that they are 1 more bad inflation print away from removing the final cut they have pencilled in for Q4 this year. 2 more bad prints, and they think its possible RBA might hike.
• RBC says that S&P500 is fairly valued and traders should take a more neutral stance.
• China is investing $820M in all solid state battery research and development. This technology is key for next gen of electric vehicles. Battery makers such as CATL will get gov support.
• IMF upgrades China’s growth forecast to 5% on strong Q1 and policy measures. Raised from 4.6% before. IMF said more comprehensive measures are needed still, atlhgouh current measures are promising.
• Goldman Sachs says that with the HKG50 market rally stalling, this represents a buying opportunity for the market.
• OpenAI has signed a reseller deal with pWC. PWC will roll out enterprise version of ChatGPT to 100k employees.
• Cathie Woods Ark invests in Elon Musk’s XAI. Investment is a 2% portion of Ark Venture Fund.
• 25% of consumers use Buy now Pay later for purchases.
• South Korea and UAE sign economic partnership agreement.
• BOJ’s Adachi says that fast rate increases will risk Japan economy. Says he expects inflation to accelerate from Summer due to weak yen.
• Whilst AAL guided to weaker EPS, generally, airline trends look strong. Memorial Day travel data looks very strong and 5 of the 10 busiest American airport travel days of all time have occurred in past 2 weeks.
• On the Singapore airline flight which saw turbulence, causing the death of a passenger, a probe found that the plane fell 54M in less than 5 seconds.
• China will likely focus on AI in their new Chip fund.
• Chicago is offering generous subsidies to convert obsolete office space into apartments and hotels, despite their own budgetary concerns.
• Israel has ben expanding their Rafah operations, evne as global uproar has been growing.

ANALYSIS:

• Yesterday we saw market dump towards the End of the day, before recovering from the 5280 level, where there was strong gamma. This dump was due to the bond auction, 2 year and 5 year, which saw weak dead which had bond yields rising.
• This morning, markets are lower again, continuing that trend, as bond yields continue lower and VIX jumps to 14.
• VIX positioning is still bearish, so I would expect that jump in VIX to pare, but we can see slightly more pullback first, so be slightly more cautious right now.
• On oil:
• Oil - flat today, has recovered back to 80 level on WTI. This is key resistance. Break above this is bullish short term. Skew has pointed to bounce for some time even as price action dropped. On Oil, I see a possible seasonal summer bounce before probably heading lower after that.
• DOw Jones Positioning update: because of airlines down this morning, we see down jones skew point lower. Calls on 40k are still very much there, so will expect bounce up later, but first it has to find support. First it will try at 38.5k, as strong put wall there. if breaks, will try bounce at 38k.
• Sbux update. Jumped to 80, rejected as we see very strong put delta there which makes resistance. Because of this, we will likely head lower, back to the 75 level where strong call delta should give support. Looking at options contracts a lot in range of 75 and 80, puts and calls.
• Gold lower today but positionally, we see traders buying calls OTM. It looks to me like its probably short term vol ahead of gdp and pce. Silver positioning more bullish but needs macro help to break ATH.
• Nvda down in premarket ad skew points more bearish. This is on profit taking. Traders selling covered calls. Can pullback slightly but Not expecting big dump because v strong positioning ITM.
  
• DATA LEDE: Australia Monthly CPI indicator came out at 3.6% vs 3.4% forecast. Last months reading was 3.5%
  
• So inflation is reaccelerating this month in Australia. RBA was hawkish last month already, so can expect more hawkishness.
  
• Japanese Consumer confidence comes out at lowest reading since November 2023.
  
• German consumer confidence numbers came out at highest level in over a year. Better than forecast. Still negative, but least negative in over a year.
  
• US mortgage numbers - applications down WOW, Mortgage rates up WOW.
  
• German Inflation Rate comes in line on YOY
  
• On monthly came softer.
  
• The Germany regional CPI came in at 0-0.1% MOM across the board, lower than expected.
  
• Richmond Fed manufacturing Index
  

MARKETS:

• Futures are lwoer as treasury yields rise. They were rising into the end of yesterdays trading session, due to weak 2year and 5 year bond auction. We see this continue.
• Nasdaq pulls back as NVDA takes a breather.
• Long end of yield curve rising, 10Y bond yields much higher.
• SPX pulls back to 5275 level this morning as treasury yields rise, and as airlines struggle this morning. Dropped yesterday to 5280 after bond auction, before pushing back to close at 5308. This morning has dropped again as yields rise, back to 5275.
• Nasdaq meanwhile hit new records yesterday, dragged up by the 7% move in NVDA. Rose to 18,900. Today, gives back those gains, down 0.7% at 18,750.
• Dow Jones: Down at 38,610. Will try to find support at 38,500, and if it fails there, then 38k, before bounce. Still seeing calls on 40k.
• GER40: Lower again to 18,530. Looking for support around this 18,500 level where it found support on Thursday. Otherwise drop to around 18,410.
• FTSE - down for 6th day in a row. Back to 8200. Down from 8479 before. Down 3.3%.
• HKG50: Down again, by 1.3%. Chinese market pulling back after almost hitting 20k 2 weeks ago. Now down 7%. Goldman Calls it a buying opportunity. In and around 18k it probably is.
• GOLD: lower today as Dollar pushes higher.
• Oil - flat, has recovered back to 80 level on WTI. This is key resistance. Break above this is bullish.
• On Oil, I see a seasonal summer bounce before probably heading lower after that.
• VIX: Jumps to 14 today. Can see vol crush later. Volatility positioning still bearish. Lots of puts on VIX.

EARNINGS:
DKS

• EPS of 3.3 beat estimates of 2.98 by 10.7%
• Revenue of 3.02B beat estimates by 2.7%, up 6.2% YOY
• Comparable sales growth was 5.3%
• Opened 4 new stores in Q1

RAISED THEIR GUIDANCE for full year

• EPS now 13.35-13.75 (raised by 4%), ahead of estimates
• Revenue of 13.1-13.2B more or less in line with estimates
• Comparable sales growth raised to 2-3% from 1-2%
• Said product pipeline from key brand partners has Never been better
• Significant momentum nd more differentiated products
• Said continues to expect robust demand.
• Raised full year outlook as comp improving, driving momentum in the business.

CAVA - strong earnings, but stock is trading very high right now, hence why market reaction is still lower despite good quarter.

• EPS of 0.12 smashed estimates of 0.04
• Revenue of 249M was up 28% YOY and beat estimates of 245.9M
• Restaurant comp sales were up 2.3%. So each restaurant branch is growing too, as well as number of branches.
• RAISED FY 2024 guidance:
• Same restaurant sales growth expected to now be 4.5-6.5% yOY, up from 3-5%
• EBITDA expected to be higher at 100-105M, up from 86-92M
• Restaurant profit margin now expected to be 23.7-24.3%, up from 22.7-23.3%
• Opened 14 new restaurants. Is investing in scalable infrastructure.

MAG 7:

• AAPL - Bank of America reiterates Apple as a top pick and maintains buy rating with a Price Target of 230. Said they view AI enabled iPhones to drive multi year upgrade cycle.
• AAPL - opening first store in Malaysia as Asian expansion continues.
• MSFT - PWC will become OPenAi’s largest chatGPT enterprise customer. OpenAI has signed a reseller deal with pWC. PWC will roll out enterprise version of ChatGPT to 100k employees.

OTHER COMPANIES:

• Airlines are lower after AAL cuts EPS guidance in Q2 and announce COO departure.
• They lowered EPS forecast for next quarter to 1-1.15, vs 1.15-1.45 before. So Cut by 18% at midpoint.
• They said this is because of a 6% decline in total revenue per available seat mile.
• They lowered operating margin forecast to 8.5-10.5% vs 9.5-11.5% before.
• In contrast, UAL reaffirmed Q2 adjusted EPS outlook of 3.75-4.25, but is trading down in sentiment.
• UAL gets an upgrade as a result from Jefferies, raising to Buy, with price target of 65 from 54.
• HOOD announced a $1 billion share repurchase program, expected to be executed over a two to three-year period starting in Q3 2024
• DKS pumps on earnings.
• ASO up in sentiment with DKS.
• CHWY up on earnings. Beat EPS and revenue. AAP up - missed sales estimate but beat EPS estimate for this quarter. But is up because whilst they reaffirmed EPS estimates, in line with expectations (or sightly ahead), they raised top end of sales guidance from 11.3-11.4 to 11.3-11.5. This was ahead of expectations.
• Merck will acquire Eyebio for up to $3B. This biotech startup will be acquired for 1.3B in cash, and 1.7B based on milestone achievements. Eyebio is a clinical stage company with US and UK operations, for eye diseases.
• Uber will offer seine river cruises during 2024 Paris olympics. This is a measure to accommodate increased demand during the 2024 Paris Olympics, including free Seine river cruises.
• MRO - Up in premarket as COP is in advanced talks with acquire MRO in deal valuing the company at just over $15B valuation.
• COP lower on this.
• Box slightly higher on better than expected earnings
• MCHP - announced plans to raise 1.1B in convertible senior notes due 2030, hence why stock price is down.
• BHP - Anglo Ameircan rejects their last minute bid to increase their bid in takeover talks.
• HUBS jumped yesterday as David Faber on CNBC yesterday highlighted that there are talks ongoing with GOOGL for acquisition.
• FSLR - UBS raises price target to 350 from 270, buy rating. Cited a more supportive pricing environment as key reason.
• GEELY - Chinas Geely launching hybrids with more fuel efficient engines.
• VINFAST - considers delaying $4B US plant.
• HES - Shareholders signed off on 53B sale to Chevron
• JPM explosion at Ohio Building. Carrying out safety checks.
• Volskwagen will be developing low cost EV cars to tackle chinese rivals, Such as XPEV and Nio.
• FMC is up as they obtain registration in Brazil for 2 herbicides, powered by Isoflex Active.
• PLTR - ETN depends partnership with Palantir to enhance AI use in operations
• Oil stocks higher as oil up
• Meme stocks pullback.
• Solar stocks pullback after big run up.
• Chinese stocks are lower.

OTHER NEWS:

• Yesterday, 2 year and 5 year note auction were both weak. It had a 1.3 BPS tail (biggest since Jan); Dealers' take was 19.52% vs. the historical average of 15%
• Auctions didn't go well—meaning there wasn't as much demand, so the government had to offer higher yields to sell them.
• This weak demand is what caused the market reaction later in the day.
• ING says that following the bad Australia inflation data, that they are 1 more bad inflation print away from removing the final cut they have pencilled in for Q4 this year. 2 more bad prints, and they think its possible RBA might hike.
• RBC says that S&P500 is fairly valued and traders should take a more neutral stance.
• China is investing $820M in all solid state battery research and development. This technology is key for next gen of electric vehicles. Battery makers such as CATL will get gov support.
• IMF upgrades China’s growth forecast to 5% on strong Q1 and policy measures. Raised from 4.6% before. IMF said more comprehensive measures are needed still, atlhgouh current measures are promising.
• Goldman Sachs says that with the HKG50 market rally stalling, this represents a buying opportunity for the market.
• OpenAI has signed a reseller deal with pWC. PWC will roll out enterprise version of ChatGPT to 100k employees.
• Cathie Woods Ark invests in Elon Musk’s XAI. Investment is a 2% portion of Ark Venture Fund.
• 25% of consumers use Buy now Pay later for purchases.
• South Korea and UAE sign economic partnership agreement.
• BOJ’s Adachi says that fast rate increases will risk Japan economy. Says he expects inflation to accelerate from Summer due to weak yen.
• Whilst AAL guided to weaker EPS, generally, airline trends look strong. Memorial Day travel data looks very strong and 5 of the 10 busiest American airport travel days of all time have occurred in past 2 weeks.
• On the Singapore airline flight which saw turbulence, causing the death of a passenger, a probe found that the plane fell 54M in less than 5 seconds.
• China will likely focus on AI in their new Chip fund.
• Chicago is offering generous subsidies to convert obsolete office space into apartments and hotels, despite their own budgetary concerns.
• Israel has ben expanding their Rafah operations, evne as global uproar has been growing.

To support more of my free daily analysis, and to see more stock specific analysis and updates, please join Tradingedge.
ANALYSIS:

• Yesterday we saw market dump towards the End of the day, before recovering from the 5280 level, where there was strong gamma. This dump was due to the bond auction, 2 year and 5 year, which saw weak dead which had bond yields rising.
• This morning, markets are lower again, continuing that trend, as bond yields continue lower and VIX jumps to 14.
• VIX positioning is still bearish, so I would expect that jump in VIX to pare, but we can see slightly more pullback first, so be slightly more cautious right now.
• On oil:
• Oil - flat today, has recovered back to 80 level on WTI. This is key resistance. Break above this is bullish short term. Skew has pointed to bounce for some time even as price action dropped. On Oil, I see a possible seasonal summer bounce before probably heading lower after that.
• DOw Jones Positioning update: because of airlines down this morning, we see down jones skew point lower. Calls on 40k are still very much there, so will expect bounce up later, but first it has to find support. First it will try at 38.5k, as strong put wall there. if breaks, will try bounce at 38k.
• Sbux update. Jumped to 80, rejected as we see very strong put delta there which makes resistance. Because of this, we will likely head lower, back to the 75 level where strong call delta should give support. Looking at options contracts a lot in range of 75 and 80, puts and calls.
• Gold lower today but positionally, we see traders buying calls OTM. It looks to me like its probably short term vol ahead of gdp and pce. Silver positioning more bullish but needs macro help to break ATH.
• Nvda down in premarket ad skew points more bearish. This is on profit taking. Traders selling covered calls. Can pullback slightly but Not expecting big dump because v strong positioning ITM.
  
• DATA LEDE: Australia Monthly CPI indicator came out at 3.6% vs 3.4% forecast. Last months reading was 3.5%
  
• So inflation is reaccelerating this month in Australia. RBA was hawkish last month already, so can expect more hawkishness.
  
• Japanese Consumer confidence comes out at lowest reading since November 2023.
  
• German consumer confidence numbers came out at highest level in over a year. Better than forecast. Still negative, but least negative in over a year.
  
• US mortgage numbers - applications down WOW, Mortgage rates up WOW.
  
• German Inflation Rate comes in line on YOY
  
• On monthly came softer.
  
• The Germany regional CPI came in at 0-0.1% MOM across the board, lower than expected.
  
• Richmond Fed manufacturing Index
  

MARKETS:

• Futures are lwoer as treasury yields rise. They were rising into the end of yesterdays trading session, due to weak 2year and 5 year bond auction. We see this continue.
• Nasdaq pulls back as NVDA takes a breather.
• Long end of yield curve rising, 10Y bond yields much higher.
• SPX pulls back to 5275 level this morning as treasury yields rise, and as airlines struggle this morning. Dropped yesterday to 5280 after bond auction, before pushing back to close at 5308. This morning has dropped again as yields rise, back to 5275.
• Nasdaq meanwhile hit new records yesterday, dragged up by the 7% move in NVDA. Rose to 18,900. Today, gives back those gains, down 0.7% at 18,750.
• Dow Jones: Down at 38,610. Will try to find support at 38,500, and if it fails there, then 38k, before bounce. Still seeing calls on 40k.
• GER40: Lower again to 18,530. Looking for support around this 18,500 level where it found support on Thursday. Otherwise drop to around 18,410.
• FTSE - down for 6th day in a row. Back to 8200. Down from 8479 before. Down 3.3%.
• HKG50: Down again, by 1.3%. Chinese market pulling back after almost hitting 20k 2 weeks ago. Now down 7%. Goldman Calls it a buying opportunity. In and around 18k it probably is.
• GOLD: lower today as Dollar pushes higher.
• Oil - flat, has recovered back to 80 level on WTI. This is key resistance. Break above this is bullish.
• On Oil, I see a seasonal summer bounce before probably heading lower after that.
• VIX: Jumps to 14 today. Can see vol crush later. Volatility positioning still bearish. Lots of puts on VIX.

EARNINGS:
DKS

• EPS of 3.3 beat estimates of 2.98 by 10.7%
• Revenue of 3.02B beat estimates by 2.7%, up 6.2% YOY
• Comparable sales growth was 5.3%
• Opened 4 new stores in Q1

RAISED THEIR GUIDANCE for full year

• EPS now 13.35-13.75 (raised by 4%), ahead of estimates
• Revenue of 13.1-13.2B more or less in line with estimates
• Comparable sales growth raised to 2-3% from 1-2%
• Said product pipeline from key brand partners has Never been better
• Significant momentum nd more differentiated products
• Said continues to expect robust demand.
• Raised full year outlook as comp improving, driving momentum in the business.

CAVA - strong earnings, but stock is trading very high right now, hence why market reaction is still lower despite good quarter.

• EPS of 0.12 smashed estimates of 0.04
• Revenue of 249M was up 28% YOY and beat estimates of 245.9M
• Restaurant comp sales were up 2.3%. So each restaurant branch is growing too, as well as number of branches.
• RAISED FY 2024 guidance:
• Same restaurant sales growth expected to now be 4.5-6.5% yOY, up from 3-5%
• EBITDA expected to be higher at 100-105M, up from 86-92M
• Restaurant profit margin now expected to be 23.7-24.3%, up from 22.7-23.3%
• Opened 14 new restaurants. Is investing in scalable infrastructure.

MAG 7:

• AAPL - Bank of America reiterates Apple as a top pick and maintains buy rating with a Price Target of 230. Said they view AI enabled iPhones to drive multi year upgrade cycle.
• AAPL - opening first store in Malaysia as Asian expansion continues.
• MSFT - PWC will become OPenAi’s largest chatGPT enterprise customer. OpenAI has signed a reseller deal with pWC. PWC will roll out enterprise version of ChatGPT to 100k employees.

OTHER COMPANIES:

• Airlines are lower after AAL cuts EPS guidance in Q2 and announce COO departure.
• They lowered EPS forecast for next quarter to 1-1.15, vs 1.15-1.45 before. So Cut by 18% at midpoint.
• They said this is because of a 6% decline in total revenue per available seat mile.
• They lowered operating margin forecast to 8.5-10.5% vs 9.5-11.5% before.
• In contrast, UAL reaffirmed Q2 adjusted EPS outlook of 3.75-4.25, but is trading down in sentiment.
• UAL gets an upgrade as a result from Jefferies, raising to Buy, with price target of 65 from 54.
• HOOD announced a $1 billion share repurchase program, expected to be executed over a two to three-year period starting in Q3 2024
• DKS pumps on earnings.
• ASO up in sentiment with DKS.
• CHWY up on earnings. Beat EPS and revenue. AAP up - missed sales estimate but beat EPS estimate for this quarter. But is up because whilst they reaffirmed EPS estimates, in line with expectations (or sightly ahead), they raised top end of sales guidance from 11.3-11.4 to 11.3-11.5. This was ahead of expectations.
• Merck will acquire Eyebio for up to $3B. This biotech startup will be acquired for 1.3B in cash, and 1.7B based on milestone achievements. Eyebio is a clinical stage company with US and UK operations, for eye diseases.
• Uber will offer seine river cruises during 2024 Paris olympics. This is a measure to accommodate increased demand during the 2024 Paris Olympics, including free Seine river cruises.
• MRO - Up in premarket as COP is in advanced talks with acquire MRO in deal valuing the company at just over $15B valuation.
• COP lower on this.
• Box slightly higher on better than expected earnings
• MCHP - announced plans to raise 1.1B in convertible senior notes due 2030, hence why stock price is down.
• BHP - Anglo Ameircan rejects their last minute bid to increase their bid in takeover talks.
• HUBS jumped yesterday as David Faber on CNBC yesterday highlighted that there are talks ongoing with GOOGL for acquisition.
• FSLR - UBS raises price target to 350 from 270, buy rating. Cited a more supportive pricing environment as key reason.
• GEELY - Chinas Geely launching hybrids with more fuel efficient engines.
• VINFAST - considers delaying $4B US plant.
• HES - Shareholders signed off on 53B sale to Chevron
• JPM explosion at Ohio Building. Carrying out safety checks.
• Volskwagen will be developing low cost EV cars to tackle chinese rivals, Such as XPEV and Nio.
• FMC is up as they obtain registration in Brazil for 2 herbicides, powered by Isoflex Active.
• PLTR - ETN depends partnership with Palantir to enhance AI use in operations
• Oil stocks higher as oil up
• Meme stocks pullback.
• Solar stocks pullback after big run up.
• Chinese stocks are lower.

OTHER NEWS:

• Yesterday, 2 year and 5 year note auction were both weak. It had a 1.3 BPS tail (biggest since Jan); Dealers' take was 19.52% vs. the historical average of 15%
• Auctions didn't go well—meaning there wasn't as much demand, so the government had to offer higher yields to sell them.
• This weak demand is what caused the market reaction later in the day.
• ING says that following the bad Australia inflation data, that they are 1 more bad inflation print away from removing the final cut they have pencilled in for Q4 this year. 2 more bad prints, and they think its possible RBA might hike.
• RBC says that S&P500 is fairly valued and traders should take a more neutral stance.
• China is investing $820M in all solid state battery research and development. This technology is key for next gen of electric vehicles. Battery makers such as CATL will get gov support.
• IMF upgrades China’s growth forecast to 5% on strong Q1 and policy measures. Raised from 4.6% before. IMF said more comprehensive measures are needed still, atlhgouh current measures are promising.
• Goldman Sachs says that with the HKG50 market rally stalling, this represents a buying opportunity for the market.
• OpenAI has signed a reseller deal with pWC. PWC will roll out enterprise version of ChatGPT to 100k employees.
• Cathie Woods Ark invests in Elon Musk’s XAI. Investment is a 2% portion of Ark Venture Fund.
• 25% of consumers use Buy now Pay later for purchases.
• South Korea and UAE sign economic partnership agreement.
• BOJ’s Adachi says that fast rate increases will risk Japan economy. Says he expects inflation to accelerate from Summer due to weak yen.
• Whilst AAL guided to weaker EPS, generally, airline trends look strong. Memorial Day travel data looks very strong and 5 of the 10 busiest American airport travel days of all time have occurred in past 2 weeks.
• On the Singapore airline flight which saw turbulence, causing the death of a passenger, a probe found that the plane fell 54M in less than 5 seconds.
• China will likely focus on AI in their new Chip fund.
• Chicago is offering generous subsidies to convert obsolete office space into apartments and hotels, despite their own budgetary concerns.
• Israel has ben expanding their Rafah operations, evne as global uproar has been growing.

To support more of my free daily analysis, and to see more stock specific analysis and updates, please join Tradingedge.

To support more of my free daily analysis, and to see more stock specific analysis and updates, please join Tradingedge.
ANALYSIS:

• Yesterday we saw market dump towards the End of the day, before recovering from the 5280 level, where there was strong gamma. This dump was due to the bond auction, 2 year and 5 year, which saw weak dead which had bond yields rising.
• This morning, markets are lower again, continuing that trend, as bond yields continue lower and VIX jumps to 14.
• VIX positioning is still bearish, so I would expect that jump in VIX to pare, but we can see slightly more pullback first, so be slightly more cautious right now.
• On oil:
• Oil - flat today, has recovered back to 80 level on WTI. This is key resistance. Break above this is bullish short term. Skew has pointed to bounce for some time even as price action dropped. On Oil, I see a possible seasonal summer bounce before probably heading lower after that.
• DOw Jones Positioning update: because of airlines down this morning, we see down jones skew point lower. Calls on 40k are still very much there, so will expect bounce up later, but first it has to find support. First it will try at 38.5k, as strong put wall there. if breaks, will try bounce at 38k.
• Sbux update. Jumped to 80, rejected as we see very strong put delta there which makes resistance. Because of this, we will likely head lower, back to the 75 level where strong call delta should give support. Looking at options contracts a lot in range of 75 and 80, puts and calls.
• Gold lower today but positionally, we see traders buying calls OTM. It looks to me like its probably short term vol ahead of gdp and pce. Silver positioning more bullish but needs macro help to break ATH.
• Nvda down in premarket ad skew points more bearish. This is on profit taking. Traders selling covered calls. Can pullback slightly but Not expecting big dump because v strong positioning ITM.
  
• DATA LEDE: Australia Monthly CPI indicator came out at 3.6% vs 3.4% forecast. Last months reading was 3.5%
  
• So inflation is reaccelerating this month in Australia. RBA was hawkish last month already, so can expect more hawkishness.
  
• Japanese Consumer confidence comes out at lowest reading since November 2023.
  
• German consumer confidence numbers came out at highest level in over a year. Better than forecast. Still negative, but least negative in over a year.
  
• US mortgage numbers - applications down WOW, Mortgage rates up WOW.
  
• German Inflation Rate comes in line on YOY
  
• On monthly came softer.
  
• The Germany regional CPI came in at 0-0.1% MOM across the board, lower than expected.
  
• Richmond Fed manufacturing Index
  

MARKETS:

• Futures are lwoer as treasury yields rise. They were rising into the end of yesterdays trading session, due to weak 2year and 5 year bond auction. We see this continue.
• Nasdaq pulls back as NVDA takes a breather.
• Long end of yield curve rising, 10Y bond yields much higher.
• SPX pulls back to 5275 level this morning as treasury yields rise, and as airlines struggle this morning. Dropped yesterday to 5280 after bond auction, before pushing back to close at 5308. This morning has dropped again as yields rise, back to 5275.
• Nasdaq meanwhile hit new records yesterday, dragged up by the 7% move in NVDA. Rose to 18,900. Today, gives back those gains, down 0.7% at 18,750.
• Dow Jones: Down at 38,610. Will try to find support at 38,500, and if it fails there, then 38k, before bounce. Still seeing calls on 40k.
• GER40: Lower again to 18,530. Looking for support around this 18,500 level where it found support on Thursday. Otherwise drop to around 18,410.
• FTSE - down for 6th day in a row. Back to 8200. Down from 8479 before. Down 3.3%.
• HKG50: Down again, by 1.3%. Chinese market pulling back after almost hitting 20k 2 weeks ago. Now down 7%. Goldman Calls it a buying opportunity. In and around 18k it probably is.
• GOLD: lower today as Dollar pushes higher.
• Oil - flat, has recovered back to 80 level on WTI. This is key resistance. Break above this is bullish.
• On Oil, I see a seasonal summer bounce before probably heading lower after that.
• VIX: Jumps to 14 today. Can see vol crush later. Volatility positioning still bearish. Lots of puts on VIX.

EARNINGS:
DKS

• EPS of 3.3 beat estimates of 2.98 by 10.7%
• Revenue of 3.02B beat estimates by 2.7%, up 6.2% YOY
• Comparable sales growth was 5.3%
• Opened 4 new stores in Q1

RAISED THEIR GUIDANCE for full year

• EPS now 13.35-13.75 (raised by 4%), ahead of estimates
• Revenue of 13.1-13.2B more or less in line with estimates
• Comparable sales growth raised to 2-3% from 1-2%
• Said product pipeline from key brand partners has Never been better
• Significant momentum nd more differentiated products
• Said continues to expect robust demand.
• Raised full year outlook as comp improving, driving momentum in the business.

CAVA - strong earnings, but stock is trading very high right now, hence why market reaction is still lower despite good quarter.

• EPS of 0.12 smashed estimates of 0.04
• Revenue of 249M was up 28% YOY and beat estimates of 245.9M
• Restaurant comp sales were up 2.3%. So each restaurant branch is growing too, as well as number of branches.
• RAISED FY 2024 guidance:
• Same restaurant sales growth expected to now be 4.5-6.5% yOY, up from 3-5%
• EBITDA expected to be higher at 100-105M, up from 86-92M
• Restaurant profit margin now expected to be 23.7-24.3%, up from 22.7-23.3%
• Opened 14 new restaurants. Is investing in scalable infrastructure.

MAG 7:

• AAPL - Bank of America reiterates Apple as a top pick and maintains buy rating with a Price Target of 230. Said they view AI enabled iPhones to drive multi year upgrade cycle.
• AAPL - opening first store in Malaysia as Asian expansion continues.
• MSFT - PWC will become OPenAi’s largest chatGPT enterprise customer. OpenAI has signed a reseller deal with pWC. PWC will roll out enterprise version of ChatGPT to 100k employees.

OTHER COMPANIES:

• Airlines are lower after AAL cuts EPS guidance in Q2 and announce COO departure.
• They lowered EPS forecast for next quarter to 1-1.15, vs 1.15-1.45 before. So Cut by 18% at midpoint.
• They said this is because of a 6% decline in total revenue per available seat mile.
• They lowered operating margin forecast to 8.5-10.5% vs 9.5-11.5% before.
• In contrast, UAL reaffirmed Q2 adjusted EPS outlook of 3.75-4.25, but is trading down in sentiment.
• UAL gets an upgrade as a result from Jefferies, raising to Buy, with price target of 65 from 54.
• HOOD announced a $1 billion share repurchase program, expected to be executed over a two to three-year period starting in Q3 2024
• DKS pumps on earnings.
• ASO up in sentiment with DKS.
• CHWY up on earnings. Beat EPS and revenue. AAP up - missed sales estimate but beat EPS estimate for this quarter. But is up because whilst they reaffirmed EPS estimates, in line with expectations (or sightly ahead), they raised top end of sales guidance from 11.3-11.4 to 11.3-11.5. This was ahead of expectations.
• Merck will acquire Eyebio for up to $3B. This biotech startup will be acquired for 1.3B in cash, and 1.7B based on milestone achievements. Eyebio is a clinical stage company with US and UK operations, for eye diseases.
• Uber will offer seine river cruises during 2024 Paris olympics. This is a measure to accommodate increased demand during the 2024 Paris Olympics, including free Seine river cruises.
• MRO - Up in premarket as COP is in advanced talks with acquire MRO in deal valuing the company at just over $15B valuation.
• COP lower on this.
• Box slightly higher on better than expected earnings
• MCHP - announced plans to raise 1.1B in convertible senior notes due 2030, hence why stock price is down.
• BHP - Anglo Ameircan rejects their last minute bid to increase their bid in takeover talks.
• HUBS jumped yesterday as David Faber on CNBC yesterday highlighted that there are talks ongoing with GOOGL for acquisition.
• FSLR - UBS raises price target to 350 from 270, buy rating. Cited a more supportive pricing environment as key reason.
• GEELY - Chinas Geely launching hybrids with more fuel efficient engines.
• VINFAST - considers delaying $4B US plant.
• HES - Shareholders signed off on 53B sale to Chevron
• JPM explosion at Ohio Building. Carrying out safety checks.
• Volskwagen will be developing low cost EV cars to tackle chinese rivals, Such as XPEV and Nio.
• FMC is up as they obtain registration in Brazil for 2 herbicides, powered by Isoflex Active.
• PLTR - ETN depends partnership with Palantir to enhance AI use in operations
• Oil stocks higher as oil up
• Meme stocks pullback.
• Solar stocks pullback after big run up.
• Chinese stocks are lower.

OTHER NEWS:

• Yesterday, 2 year and 5 year note auction were both weak. It had a 1.3 BPS tail (biggest since Jan); Dealers' take was 19.52% vs. the historical average of 15%
• Auctions didn't go well—meaning there wasn't as much demand, so the government had to offer higher yields to sell them.
• This weak demand is what caused the market reaction later in the day.
• ING says that following the bad Australia inflation data, that they are 1 more bad inflation print away from removing the final cut they have pencilled in for Q4 this year. 2 more bad prints, and they think its possible RBA might hike.
• RBC says that S&P500 is fairly valued and traders should take a more neutral stance.
• China is investing $820M in all solid state battery research and development. This technology is key for next gen of electric vehicles. Battery makers such as CATL will get gov support.
• IMF upgrades China’s growth forecast to 5% on strong Q1 and policy measures. Raised from 4.6% before. IMF said more comprehensive measures are needed still, atlhgouh current measures are promising.
• Goldman Sachs says that with the HKG50 market rally stalling, this represents a buying opportunity for the market.
• OpenAI has signed a reseller deal with pWC. PWC will roll out enterprise version of ChatGPT to 100k employees.
• Cathie Woods Ark invests in Elon Musk’s XAI. Investment is a 2% portion of Ark Venture Fund.
• 25% of consumers use Buy now Pay later for purchases.
• South Korea and UAE sign economic partnership agreement.
• BOJ’s Adachi says that fast rate increases will risk Japan economy. Says he expects inflation to accelerate from Summer due to weak yen.
• Whilst AAL guided to weaker EPS, generally, airline trends look strong. Memorial Day travel data looks very strong and 5 of the 10 busiest American airport travel days of all time have occurred in past 2 weeks.
• On the Singapore airline flight which saw turbulence, causing the death of a passenger, a probe found that the plane fell 54M in less than 5 seconds.
• China will likely focus on AI in their new Chip fund.
• Chicago is offering generous subsidies to convert obsolete office space into apartments and hotels, despite their own budgetary concerns.
• Israel has ben expanding their Rafah operations, evne as global uproar has been growing.

To support more of my free daily analysis, and to see more stock specific analysis and updates, please join Tradingedge.

Hi there,
19 (M), here, I wanted to ask what Your guy’s opinion is on going 100% Berkshire Hathaway vs S&P 500.
I’m from a European country with 27.5% capital gains taxes on dividends, and this is sadly unavoidable even with accumulating ETFs since You still have to pay a 27.5% tax on what is reinvested, so basically there’s nearly no difference between an accumulating and distributing ETF, other than saving on broker fees. I believe that the tax would have a big effect on the snowball effect in the long term, and I’m better of just sticking to Berkshire, since I pay zero taxes until I sell. The downside is, that I’m less diversified than I would be if I was 100% S&P 500. Nevertheless, even if Berkshire were to slightly underperform the S&P, I would still come ahead. Would doing something like a 50/50 split make sense between the two?
Side note, I’m currently 100% Berkshire, but I could put my monthly contribution into the S&P500 instead.

Hi all, the usual I don’t really have people to share this with, hence sharing this with the community here, to also have a discussion on my approach and journey so far.
Context:
I live in Singapore, and hence all figures are in SGD. I currently earn an average salary of around 55-60K per year (including bonuses), and started work around 2 years ago in 2022. I only started tracking my net worth in May 2023, hence I now have a full year of figures to look through and analyse.
The individual tax rate in Singapore is relatively low (with no capital gains taxes), and Singapore has a mandated pension system where 20% of my yearly pay is taken and put in the pension system (essentially my take home pay is 80% of the figure), while the employer contributes another 17%. This has been included in my net worth, as the money still belongs to me and earns an interest rate of around 2.5% - 4%, but can only be accessed at 55 years of age. The pension can however, also be used to purchase property/health insurance/medical expenses prior to the age of 55.
I am very lucky to be able to live with my parents, and provide them with roughly 20% of my take home pay in return as "rental". As such, I do not have rental expenses, and am lucky to be able to have homecooked food for dinner. Am also grateful to my parents for bringing me all the way to double degrees (which while heavily subsidised by the government still costs 40K), and still being financially prudent to have more than enough for their own retirements such that I will not have to worry about them. I do not have any debts as well.
That leaves me with about 60% of my salary as my “real” take home pay per month. My expenditures are extremely low, sometimes between 300-500 a month. I meal prep for my work weeks to further supplement my ability to save, as well as improve my cooking skills, as well as eat healthier and meet my macro targets better.
Motivation:
I’ve never had too many wants in life (other than travel), and am easily contented. However, I’ve come to realise that personally for me, the single biggest want I have is the want for freedom, to have control over my life and time, instead of having no choice but to work in corporate for the rest of my life. This doesn’t mean I would just retire the moment I hit FI, but that at least I’d have the choice to do whatever I want to, which is what is most important to me. To me, all other wants (other than travelling) come secondary to this, which is why my saving rates are so high, because to me, I’m spending it on the one thing most important to me – freedom.
Also, I just like seeing number go up every month, it excites my monkey brain like it’s a minigame in real life.
The Numbers:-
Total NW as at the end of May: $137,599.85
Total NW in equities: $94,782.79
Total NW in pension: $48,816.48
Average equities contribution per month over the past 12 months: $2,594
Detailed Breakdown and Graphs: https://imgur.com/a/YKPEBKU
The investment strategy:
As previously mentioned, I am lucky enough to be living with my parents. As such, I have no mortgages, rents or debts to service, which has allowed me the opportunity to go aggressively 100% in on equities, instead of building things like an emergency 6-month expense buffer. When I eventually have to move out, there will definitely be one started, but at the moment I find it is in my best interest to be as aggressive as possible to allow the compounding machine to start snowballing.
Most of my investments are in the S&P 500, unless I see opportunities in individual stocks (only blue chip companies). I personally lean towards the view that the S&P 500 is sufficiently diversified, given the global reach of the many companies within. I have been lucky enough to catch investments in individual tech stocks such as ADBE, AMZN, MSFT during the tech crash, which has bolstered my portfolio performance to around a 40% return on investment.
Otherwise, I consistently DCA into the markets every month otherwise, knowing it is better to stay invested in the markets than to time it. As Singapore has a tax treaty with the UK, my investments are in ETFs which track the SP500 domiciled in the LSE. I do not expect to consistently outperform the S&P500, and know I am not smart enough to beat the market consistently, and likely just got lucky on my performance so far. Whether the market continues the bull run it’s been on (to be honest, kinda sucks as I really wanted to accumulate much more before it had such a massive run up), or crashes down further lower, I will just continue to hold and buy more, knowing the time horizon in front of me is fairly long.
Aside from financial investments, I also value investing in myself, taking professional qualifications and examinations, and maintaining a positive attitude towards learning more at my workplace, as well as attending more networking functions all to hopefully climb the corporate ladder a little bit faster, and increase my income in addition to my saving rates.
Additional Thoughts:
· Initially, I have occasionally struggled with being overtly frugal, especially when first starting out. When I travelled to Japan, for example, while I really wanted to try Omakase, which wasn’t even particular expensive for a decent joint there, but I was stuck in a mindset of not wanting to spend too much to accelerate my FI progress as fast as possible. When I got back and regretted it, I reflected on this incident, and realised I needed to stop and smell the flowers once in a while, especially if it was something that would have brought me joy and made me happier. Since then, when wanting to purchase something, I’ve always tried to stop and ask myself – “Does this truly make me happy, or significantly improve my quality of life?” If the answer is yes, I’ve stopped hesitating on spending on experiences or wants like these. Spending on family, overseas friends when I host them, a higher end phone when my old one has served me well for 4 years, paying more for experiences when I travel… It definitely gets easier to do so as my NW goes up as well, being aware that the effects of compounding and starting early on a now substantial number will ultimately make these relatively small expenses obsolete in the long run.
· During COVID, I lost around $10,000 after discovering options (as many of us did), as well as during the crypto run-up (FTX and some shit coins). While it was a devastatingly significant amount of money at the time as I was still in university with no income, just savings from working odd jobs and internships, I’ve since realised it was a good thing I got that out of my system and learnt my lessons at such a young age, when the losses were relatively low due to my low NW at the time. Ironically, losing that amount of money while I was young and stupid (I treat it as my stock market tuition) would likely save me so much more in the long run, as I now know not to recklessly gamble on quick rich schemes, and instead see FI as a marathon, more than a race.
· Churn those credit cards and brokerage rewards!! Throughout churning these rewards, I've probably made it out with $3,000+, which I've since spent on my vacations and travels. If you're willing to put in the effort to track these credit card requirements, make timely payments and can be disciplined enough not to spend too much, it's literally free money. Additionally, many of these credit cards ultimately end up as part of my CC Strategy, where I earn miles/cashback on spending thereafter.
Concluding thoughts:
I might add more thoughts if I think of anything, will be thinking of doing this review once a year near my birthday to track my progress, and see if there have been new insights or thoughts as I go along. Hope everyone has a great day ahead, and looking forward to hear any opinions or thoughts if any (both positive and negative lol). Thanks for reading!

Bom noite senhoritos e senhoritas, Tenho visto muita gente nova começando a investir esses dias e praticamente ter os mesmos problemas. Parece algo simples mas muitas pessoas investem sem nenhuma estrategia ou método e isso tende a causar problemas básicos. Uma estratégia de investimento é um conjunto de regras, comportamentos e procedimentos projetados para orientar a seleção de uma carteira de investimentos. Essencialmente, é um plano sistemático para alcançar seus objetivos financeiros, seja para curto, médio ou longo prazo. Primeiro de tudo se deve definir porcentagens; exemplo

30% fiis, 30% ações, 30% renda fixa, 10% fica de caixa / reserva de emergência. Nesse modelo a volatilidade e bem pequena, quase não se tem quedas bruscas (contanto que as ações não sejam ruins)

40% ações, 40fiis, 20% caixa / reserva de emergência; Aqui e mais simples, você tem bastante caixa pra investir no que for melhor... Basicamente da pra pegar boas oportunidades

40% ETFs e 40% ações e 20% caixa / reserva; Boa opção pra crescimento com uma bom fluxo de caixa e uma reserva alta pra eventuais oportunidades ou problemas.

30% ações, 30% fiis e 30% ações internacionais com 10% de caixa / reserva; Aqui e o balanceamento internacional, otimo pra quem pretende pegar oportunidades fora do Brasil.

100% ETFs (estrategia mais comum dos Boogleheads) Aqui funciona com ETFs de renda fixa e globais combinados, a carteira e 100% neutra e não vai depender de escolhas do dono em si.

1 ETF sobre todos os ETFs

Aqui e a estrategia suprema de investir no mundo inteiro usando apenas um ETF "VT". (WRLD11 no BR) Aqui você literalmente investe em apenas um ETF e vai viver a vida ao invés de reclamar no grupo.

Depois de decidir a porcentagem você vai precisar criar regras pra os seus investimentos... Assim você vai evitar de comprar coisas duvidosas. Essas regras são pessoais então eu vou adicionar algumas das "minhas" regras que normalmente uso pra escolher ações.

° Para serem escolhidos pra carteira os ativos precisam ter rentabilidade competitiva com o S&P500 (serve pra ações e ETFs)

° As ações precisam ter lucros crescentes

° Ações precisam estar em setores seguros da economia

° Ações não podem estar em setores cíclicos ou ter histórico de variações bruscas.

° A quantidade de ativos brasileiros não pode passar de 10, ativos internacionais não podem passar de 10.

° Ações internacionais precisam apresentar crescimento consistente em prazos de 10 anos

° Reits precisam apresentar um crescimento de dividendos de no minimo 5 anos. (Não confundir com yeld)

° ETFs não podem exceder a quantidade de 3.

° ETFs precisam ter a quantidade mínima de 30% da carteira.

° Fundos imobiliários não podem exceder a quantidade de 2.

° Fundos imobiliários só podem ser do tipo Fofs com taxas a baixo de 0.50% ao ano.

° Fundos imobiliários não podem exceder 30% da carteira.

°10% de caixa ou reserva de emergência e obrigatório podendo chegar a 20%.

° Dividendos ficam na reserva de emergência.

° Reserva de emergência pode ser usada como reserva de oportunidade.

° Vendas de ativos apenas se ele não se encaixar na estrategia de investimento.

Depois de decidir a sua estrategia e recomendado que o investidor pare de (fazer besteira) escolher os ativos e siga apenas as regras de investimento. Não existe emoção ou apego, apenas gerenciamento das regras... Ela impede empresas ruins e deixa a lista de empresas boas livres evitando problemas. Claro que são minhas regras, eu levei menos de 2 minutos pra escrever mas vocês podem fazer suas próprias regras. Evidentemente eu não foco em dividendos e praticamente 70% da minha carteira funciona passivamente (apesar disso não ser uma regra). Minha estrategia de investimentos busca vencer o S&P 500, sinceramente tenho tido resultados muito bons e quero frisar a importância da estrategia. Então, vocês já tem suas estrategias de investimentos? Inclusive existe um grupo pra galera que ta começando falar sobre estrategias e ativos no geral... Caso se interessarem em conhecer ou pedir alguma dica. https://chat.whatsapp.com/IdO9ziwGQvB3OQGbpmpgGf

Hello everyone,
I would like to create an index as part of my master's thesis. I have downloaded the transaction data from various whisky bottles.
Now I am faced with the problem that these should be converted into the same format as the S&P 500.
In other words, I want a percentage change in the value for each day (except weekends, as with the S&P500), but some of the values are several weeks apart. How can I add all the missing days and specify a percentage change for these days?
I have the data like this:
16/03/2013 € 903.00
01/10/2013 € 1,130.00
22/03/2014 € 1,380.00
30/04/2016 € 2,010.00
01/04/2017 € 2,860.00
01/08/2017 € 3,465.40
06/01/2018 € 3,162.00
08/01/2018 € 3,100.85
13/03/2018 € 2,931.38
10/04/2018 € 2,747.41
07/05/2018 € 2,952.27
02/07/2018 € 3,000.44
05/11/2018 € 3,263.72
04/04/2020 € 2,480.50
04/04/2022 € 4,602.58
07/11/2022 € 4,487.37
I would like to have the data like this (example):
24/10/2005 € 1,199.38 -0.24%
25/10/2005 € 1,196.54 -0.43%
26/10/2005 € 1,191.38 -1.05%
27/10/2005 € 1,178.90 1.65%
28/10/2005 € 1,198.41 0.72%
31/10/2005 € 1,207.01 -0.35%
01/11/2005 € 1,202.76 1.00%
02/11/2005 € 1,214.76 0.43%
03/11/2005 € 1,219.94 0.02%
04/11/2005 € 1,220.14 0.22%
07/11/2005 € 1,222.81 -0.35%
08/11/2005 € 1,218.59 0.17%
09/11/2005 € 1,220.65 0.84%
10/11/2005 € 1,230.96 0.31%
11/11/2005 € 1,234.72 -0.08%
14/11/2005 € 1,233.76 -0.39%

DISCLAIMER: I'd like to note that I do not consider myself an expert on many of the topics he talks about or even economics in general but a lot of what I'm about to say is pretty easily verifiable and basic, and I'll try to be clear that I'm expressing my opinion and not fact when I'm doing so. Given my lack of expertise, none of what I say here should be considered as the final authority on these topics, it's a reddit post for fucks sake, I encourage everyone to search up the relevant data and information on the topics they are interested in or claims they find dubious. It's really not that hard and all the links and data I'm gonna cite here took me less than five minutes to find for each piece of information. If you're not familiar with where to find this data it might take you longer but I promise that anyone with access to the internet can do the same thing I'm doing. Finally, for those looking for some opinionless, academic argument, that's not what this is, this is gonna sound like a rant because it is, I'm posting this for nothing more than my own satisfaction, take from it what you will.
Ok I'm writing this after I finished the whole thing and I said that I'd try to be clear that I'm expressing my opinion and not fact when I'm doing so and the basically entire second half of this is my opinion and I don't make that very clear so sorry about that.
Honestly I'd love to be wrong because I really do think that younger people are at a disadvantage compared to previous generations at the same age but the arguments he makes and the data he uses throughout his talk just sound like such bullshit to me.
https://www.ted.com/talks/scott\_galloway\_how\_the\_us\_is\_destroying\_young\_people\_s\_future?
https://www.profgalloway.com/war-on-the-young/
Scott Galloway recently did a Ted talk titled "How the US is destroying young people's future", as well as an accompanying blog post. He's made some fair points about how young people have been put at an inherent disadvantage and that they have it harder than previous generations. That's most likely true and I personally support that point of view, but the a lot data and numbers he makes this argument with seem to be cherry picked, misleading, or just straight up wrong. So let's break his talk down. u/JustTaxLandLol made a pretty good post about him comparing median wages to the S&P500 (https://www.reddit.com/badeconomics/comments/1cc3rs8/scott\_galloway\_compares\_median\_wage\_to\_sp500/) but I think that Galloway's mistakes are much more comprehensive than just that particular slide.
The first slide with data makes a claim about how pre-tax income, adjusted for inflation, has decreased across generations from grandparents to parents to kids, and that cost of public colleges and home prices have increased significantly across generations too. First of all, categorising generations by whether they have children or grandchildren is kinda nuts. That's a very wide, overlapping, range of ages. If he has actually fixed age ranges for each generation that don't overlap and just made these categorisations for the sake of understandability to a nonacademic audience, I still think that's the wrong choice but fine. However, his claim that real income has decreased across generations is weak at best. This working paper (https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/files/2024007pap.pdf) from the Fed Reserve was published February 2024, and from the figures that start at page 35, shows that by almost every categorisation they could think of, GenZ earns more at the same age than every previous generation before them. There's some conflict here with Raj Chetty's work but I don't have the time or knowledge to reconcile the two perspectives but at best, the pre-tax income numbers Galloway presents are questionable at best. Furthermore, he doesn't provide anyone a chance at even checking the sources he gets this information from. Not once in his entire talk does he cite a single source. He couldn't even have some tiny text at the bottom of his tables or diagrams saying what organisation he got this data from. Ok so that crossed out bit is wrong, he does have sources they're just very very faint and you can see them if you squint hard enough at the bottom left corner of his graphs. But the source he gives for this slide is a joke. Here's the link https://www.profgalloway.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Table-01.png
His "source" is his own analysis. Ok so by his analysis, the average cost of public college is 56000*0.43 = 24080. I'm gonna use numbers from this US News page (https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/paying-for-college/articles/paying-for-college-infographic), which might not be the most reliable source in the world, but it's probably somewhere in the ballpark. So according to US News, average tuition for the 2023-2024 school year for out of state students going to a public school is 23,630 and 10,662 for in state students. If these numbers are anywhere near accurate, the only conclusion I can draw is that Galloway has cherry-picked his data by only including the cost for out of state students in his analysis. First of all, public schools in the US are there to provide affordable access to higher education FOR RESIDENTS OF ITS STATE. Using only out of state numbers is absolutely ridiculous. Secondly, even if he used only the in state numbers, 10662/56000 is approximately equal to 19%. So if I use his very very questionable pre-tax income numbers, cost of public college for in state students has still increased across his categorisation of generations. It's not like his point would have been invalidated if he had used the in-state numbers, a trend of tuition increasing as a percentage of real income across multiple generations is still very bad. This is my opinion but I guess that he just wanted to find a nice shocking number. I didn't catch this but in their post, u/JustTaxLandLol notes that later on Galloway says "real median income from labor is up 40% since 1974" so he's also contradicting himself in the same talk.
I couldn't be bothered to look into the house price to income column he has so I don't have any comments on that.
His next slide is a point about how the percentage of 30 year olds earning more than their parents did at 30 has been decreasing very significantly over time. This is from a paper in 2016 by Raj Chetty (link: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aal4617). I've seen some counterarguments about the methods used in the paper but there are counterarguments for basically every inequality paper in existence so I'd take them with a grain of salt. Those points are more complex than the scope of this post and I lack the expertise to be making them anyways so I believe this slide. I'll admit that Galloway makes a good argument for this slide.
Right after this slide he says "As a result, people over the age of 55 feel pretty good about America, but less than one in five people under the age of 34 feel very good about America. This creates an incendiary, righteous movement...". He supports this with data on the percentage of US adults who feel "extremely proud" to be American.
Before I talk about the data on this slide, I'd like to be a little anal about things and pick apart his wording and causal claims he makes. When Galloway says "as a result" he's making a causal claim about the relationship between a young person's earning ability and their national pride. Leaving aside the econometric issues of making random causal claims, this is a ridiculous marginalisation of all the other critically important issues in the US. It seems pretty clear to me that reduced national pride amongst younger individuals is a combination of a lack of social mobility (or however you want to word your version of the fading American dream), the continued existence of systematic racism and sexism, US response to ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, bodily autonomy (abortion), and many other issues. Not to say that the economic disadvantages of young people doesn't play a role in causing this lack of national pride but come on. He also says "this creates an incendiary righteous movement...". Ok if the "as a result" from the last sentence could be interpreted as the economic disadvantages of young people play some part in their dissatisfaction with the government, it should be obvious to anyone not living under a rock that many of the political conflicts and movements that have erupted in the US over the past few years have little, if anything, to do with earning ability. In the slide after the poll data he shows three photos, one of a MeToo protest, one of a BLM protest, and another of a pro-Palestine protest. I can only interpret this as him making the claim that the younger generations economic difficulties are causally linked to those movements, which is totally bananas.
Now lets talk about the data. He got this from the Gallup polls (link: https://news.gallup.com/poll/394202/record-low-extremely-proud-american.aspx, there's a link to download the pdf with the poll numbers at the end of this article). There are 5 options for the Gallup poll: "Extremely proud"; "Very proud"; "Moderately proud"; "Only a little proud"; or "Not at all proud". So Galloway is cherry-picking again. To be fair, it's true that even including the rest of the answers, a quick glance at the data suggests (very strongly) that young people are less proud than older people. There are also more young people who choose "Not at all proud" (11% for 18-34 and 1% for 55+). Though there is probably some argument to be made about whether "extreme" pride is a good thing. Furthermore, "pretty good" and "very good" do not reflect the extremity of choosing, well, the most extreme option.
As an introduction to his next slide he says that "a decent proxy for how much we value youth labor is minimum wage". I've never heard of this before and am very very skeptical but I'm willing to attribute this to my own ignorance so I'll leave that sentence alone. So on this slide there's a graph with two lines, one is minimum wage across time adjusted for inflation, the other is whats supposed to be minimum wage if adjusted for productivity (also adjusted to inflation I assume). Galloway got this data form the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) (https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/), which shows that this gap between productivity began around 1979. This was when Carter was president and right before the Reagan administration. Those who know about the economic history of this time probably won't be surprised since a lot of the policies of this time were rather inegalitarian and heavily favoured the wealthy. I agree that many of the policies of the time contributed heavily to the inequality America faces today and though I haven't read any studies about how this affects minimum wage workers, I believe that minimum wage workers or low income workers in general today have significantly lower purchasing power relative to a few decades ago.
What I have a problem with here is the idea that productivity and minimum wage should increase in tandem. According to the EPI, "Productivity measures how much total economywide income is generated (i.e., for workers, business owners, landlords, and everybody else together) in an average hour of work" and "pay is defined as the average compensation (wages and benefits) of production and nonsupervisory workers. The pay for this group is one appropriate benchmark for 'typical worker pay' because production and nonsupervisory workers have made up roughly 80% of the U.S. workforce over the entire period shown in the figure and because the data for production and nonsupervisory workers exclude extremely highly paid managerial workers like CEOs and other corporate executives". Before I try to break down my complaints with the measures used, my immediate reaction when I saw this was that it seems rather stupid to compare the relationship between average productivity and minimum wage in an industrial economy against the same relationship in a service oriented one. There are just more jobs now that let you make an impact on the economy far beyond what you are paid and it is so so difficult to quantify this change. Using a similar argument, I really have no clue how macro people make models or do estimates for things like productivity but I'm quite skeptical about the reliability of using such a measure of productivity because of the increased prevalence of second, third, or n-th order effects that would be present in a measure of something like total gdp but pretty much impossible to identify for any employer. For those who want to read more about this difference between productivity and compensation I think this is the most relevant paper from EPI (https://files.epi.org/2015/understanding-productivity-pay-divergence-final.pdf). There are some points I'm not satisfied with in this paper like them attributing the entirety of the difference between median hourly compensation to average consumer hourly compensation but that would take more time than I want to spend on this.
Now we're still on the same slide. Galloway says "we've kept it [minimum wage] purposely pretty low" twice in three sentences. Now he's suggesting that there's some collective out there that has the political power and desire to keep minimum wage low. By "we" I think he means to suggest that the old-timers have banded together to screw the young people over. Ok buddy. I'm stepping outside the bounds of what's considered strictly economics here a little but pinning the injustices of society on some ethereal enemy whose existence can never be disproven is the same as taking "advantage of the flaws in our species with medieval institutions, Paleolithic instincts, and godlike technology" (Galloway's words, same TED talk) to me. Maybe there really is some cabal of scheming geezers out there who have some twisted desire to keep the minimum wage low, but I'm more inclined to believe that a lot of these "injustices" are a result of our existing political and societal institutions being poor and inefficient aggregators of our desires as a society, rewarding selfishness instead of cooperation. This certainly makes the problem harder to solve than if there were just some evil 'others' we could get rid of and be done with. Having a target to direct our outrage at, believing that I am good and they are bad, is easier than facing the reality that everyone is born with the selfishness that creates the injustices we live with but that's not gonna make people more agreeable. As an economist, I study the theory of incentives to use the same human selfishness that creates all the problems Galloway talks about to create solutions that hopefully improve our quality of life. This is what I believe is the beauty of being human, all the good and bad that happens stem from the same desires, it is our job to create institutions and systems that allow us to channel our desires in a way that benefits everyone, but I digress. The point is, this enemy that Galloway creates is an effective tactic at convincing people of his argument, but I don't believe such a perspective benefits society at all. Mistakes should be corrected, that doesn't mean they're always the result of ill intentions.
His next slide compares the difference between percentage increase in median household income against percentage increase in median home price, as well as a comparison of the median monthly mortgage between 2019 and 2024. I have nothing to say about the graph, I agree that over time, home prices have increased to an unacceptable level. The Fed funds rate went from 2.4 percent in Feb 2019 to 5.33 percent in Feb 2024 (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/fedfunds). To his credit, Galloway does attribute this increase in mortgage payments to "an acceleration in interest rates" but what's the alternative? Don't increase interest rates? Then if I was Galloway I'd make the same TED talk and talk about how the continued low interest rates contributed to rampant inflation that made all the poor people even poorer. It seems like he's decided to take whatever bad economic event that seems somewhat relevant and made it to be the result of some group's dogged determination to keep the younger generation down. Why is the increase from pre- to post-covid prices on anything surprising. I'd like to meet the genius who saw covid coming and intentionally created this increase in home prices.
He also says "the most expensive homes in the world, based on this metric, are number three, Vancouver. Why? Because 60 percent of the cost of building a home goes to permits...". I have no idea what point he's making here. Based on what metric, median home price? Monthly mortgage payments? Why do I care about Vancouver, a Canadian city, being number three? Then he talks about how "the incumbents that own assets have weaponized government". Either he's switched to talking about oligopolistic lobbyists in general without saying so or he's still talking about Canada. I dunno. Someone please explain. Then he says "this is the transfer I'm going to be speaking about". Also, everything he just said is talking about how there exists a group of people trying to PREVENT transfers of wealth to new entrants. And there was huge applause after that sentence. Nutsos, all of them.
Ok next slide. Galloway presents two pie charts, comparing the share of household wealth by age in 1989 to 2023. So he's talking directly about inequality in wealth now. Inequality in the US is really really bad, that's a fact. I'm a big fan of the work of Emmanuel Saez, Gabriel Zucman, and Thomas Piketty. These people have been at the forefront of research on inequality for many years now and though their work is not flawless, I'm convinced by the data they present and the methods by which they have aggregated the data and what they show is that inequality is worse than even what the pie charts Galloway presents suggest. However, this is not to say that Galloway makes a valid argument. Please note the grey bits in the pie chart. If Galloway has shown the numbers for everyone under 40 and above 70, the group that's excluded are those between 40 and 70. So those in the age range of 40-70 owned 100 - 19 - 12 = 69% of household wealth in 1989 and 100 - 30 - 7 = 63% in 2023. I could probably go and find how the age demographics of the population have changed over time and I think that with declining birth rates, the percentage change in age demographics would be pretty close to the percentage change in household wealth but I'm tired of beating every slide to death so I'll leave that to someone else if anyone's motivated enough to do that (if my hypothesis is wrong here just comment and I'll make that change). My first thought when I saw this though was again, this guy has paid no regard to structural change in society. Given the increased accessibility of buying stocks over the past three decades is it really that surprising that older people who have had more time and cash at the start of the digital age to invest in companies that are now massive mega-corporations have experienced a higher return on their capital. This is not to say that none of this change in the share of wealth held by those under 40 is due to some inherent unfairness in our society and I have neither the time nor knowledge to separate these effects out but to say that this was a "purposeful" effort to cut their wealth in half is complete and utter bullshit. Also, this guy makes another causal claim WITH NOTHING BUT A CHANGE IN SHARE OF HOUSEHOLD WEALTH. Congratulations everyone Scott Galloway has just made every econometrician in the world redundant, I always knew my professors were just trying to confuse me with funny symbols and Greek letters, someone get this guy a Nobel Prize.
Then while introducing his next slide Galloway says that his analyst's presence in the audience "brings the average age of the entire conference down in 11 days". So he's saying that TED knows exactly who's showing up to their event before it happens and that they have the exact birthdates of everyone in the audience too and that they've given this information to one of their speakers. A friend of mine has told me he's just making a joke and that I should let this point go because I'm being too anal about things but yeah I become anal about things when someone suggests sweeping institutional changes in a talk viewed by millions of people so thought I'd include it anyways just as another example of the bullshit this guy has been spewing.
When he moves on to the actual content in the slide the first point he makes is about lower acceptance rates in schools. So I don't have data on this because I couldn't be bothered to go find any so again, I'll change my statement if anyone has reliable data indicating otherwise but I think its pretty safe to say that way less people used to apply than before and combined with an increase in international student applications and enrollments the competition is just way higher than before. The most obvious explanation would be that higher education institutions have made the mistake of not increasing enrollments at a rate quick enough to meet demand. However, according to US News (https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/how-many-universities-are-in-the-us-and-why-that-number-is-changing) there were 3982 degree-granting postsecondary institutions in the US. and UCLA is ranked 15th in national universities. So why is it surprising now that university education is becoming more popular that higher ranked universities are harder to get into. So instead of expanding enrollment I think that a well thought out plan of affirmative action would be a much better option of giving "unremarkable kids and giving them a shot at being remarkable" (what this well thought out plan may be I don't know, I honestly didn't even search up any statistics about affirmative action this was just the first solution I thought of that didn't involve ignoring the crowning achievement of statistics). To his credit, Galloway does include a point about income-based affirmative action at the end of his talk, though he overwhelmingly emphasises increasing enrollment in schools. I don't have any data about that but I think that class sizes at public universities are large enough as it is.
The rest of the slide gives numbers on college debt of house price compared to first year income. College debt is ridiculously high and many people struggle because of it. I don't have the solution and neither does Galloway because he doesn't really mention it. I think that house price-to-first year income is a poor comparison because it doesn't take into account average rate of income increase and no normal person from any generation is looking to buy a house with first year income but there's probably a more appropriate metric out there that shows a similar change anyways so I'm ok with that.
Then he talks about him and his "colleagues" who "artificially constrain supply to create aspiration and scarcity". I would like to meet the professors who have control over enrollment rates because none of mine did. Then he says "to my colleagues in higher ed: we're public servants, not fucking Chanel bags". The marketing professor from NYU says he's a public servant...ok.
The slide after that compares Harvard's increase in endowment compared to their increase in enrollment and he calls them a "hedge fund offering classes". I see no issue with this point, he made a great argument, can't really criticise anything here.
Don't worry though he makes up for it by immediately making one of the most egregious statements in this whole talk. We're looking at his next slide, the one titled "Grand Bargain" now. He says that the government should take some of the money that's supposed to be used to forgive existing loans to about 500 of the top public universities to reduce tuition by 2% and year, expand enrollments by 6% a year, and increase vocational programs to 20% of the degrees granted. Then the slide after that, claims this will double freshman seats and cut costs in half in just 10 years. Ok so he thinks that most of the money "earmarked to bail out the one third of people that got to go to college on the backs of the two thirds that didn't" should go to future students instead because, I assume from the tone of his words, he doesn't think they need or deserve all that loan forgiveness. So why bring up the increase in college debt previously (the slide I talked about three paragraphs ago)? Anyways that's not the crazy thing. Let's see what happens if you reduce tuition by 2% a year for 10 years. So the calculation goes like this 0.98^{10} is approximately equal to 0.81. So with the number he puts up, tuition decreases by 19% in ten years. If everything before this slide could be attributed to cherry-picking, stupidity, or lack of good data, then fine he's just ignorant even though he shouldn't have been if he went up there to make that talk. But now this is just a FUCKING BAREFACED LIE. I cannot think of a greater insult to the audience's intelligence than the fact that this guy didn't think anyone would pull out a fucking calculator and do the calculation themselves. I won't blame the audience for not saying anything because I'm not sure I would have wanted to do that either but at least from youtube and reddit comments there are a decent number of people who didn't realise this. A similar calculation shows that expanding enrollment by 6% per year increases seats by about 80% total (1.06^{10}). Not sure how that translates in terms of freshman seats but at least this is closer than the tuition claim.
Then his next slide compares wages to the s&p500. This is the point of u/JustTaxLandLol's post and I think his post and the discussion in the comments covers most if not all of my thoughts so you can just read that. https://www.reddit.com/badeconomics/comments/1cc3rs8/scott_galloway_compares_median_wage_to_sp500/
Ok next slide, "The Transfer: Purposeful". Oh yay he's about to make another causal claim with nothing but a graph on the change in top marginal tax rates for corporations and individuals. And if we skip ahead to the next slide we'll realise that this claim is that the gradual decrease in top marginal tax rates for corporations and individuals results in lowered senior poverty and child poverty either remains constant or increases. Yes everybody the newest advancement in economic research has just been released. Lowering top tax rates decreases senior poverty and increases child poverty. And Scott Galloway made that argument in 24 seconds (transcript on TED website has time markers).
Man I really set out with the intention to keep the tone of this post as neutral as I could but I'm just writing out my internal dialogue with less swearing now. I apologise to those who would have preferred a more careful and less emotional knee-jerk response of an analysis but this is a reddit post, its not like there are standards.
Now he moves on to talking about social security. Galloway says "it would cost 11 billion dollars to expand the child tax credit. But that gets stripped out of the infrastructure bill". So zero explanation about why it would cost 11 billion dollars to expand the child tax credit, why not more or less, no comment about how many children it would affect, how much money it would mean for each child or family, just some number that you have to accept. Most of the time there's no why to the amount of funding that the government allocates to policies but at least there's some breakdown to how its going to be used, Galloway doesn't even have that. This is before we even consider the fact that child tax credit was expanded this year (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/child-tax-credit-2024-who-qualifies/). Maybe he's talking about some other issue that I'm not aware of but I don't think so. He says he got the social security spending data from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which is a think tank. I don't want to sort through their website to fact check so I'll accept it as the truth but as far as I know the actual social security administration releases their facts and figures for the year August of next year so I'm not sure why he didn't just use the 2022 numbers from a more reliable source.
His next few couple slides are about the increasing age of politicians. I think this is a great point but he probably should have used a better example of a younger politician than Justin Trudeau.
Then at around the 10 minute mark, using his slide titled "Generational Theft", Galloway claims that "we pumped the economy" during covid so that the Nasdaq would gain value, causing "intergenerational theft". I don't know if he thinks it was intentional or not but how is he going to completely ignore the fact that the stimulus checks were primarily for households that were struggling due to the greatest unemployment rate we have seen in our lifetime (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/06/11/unemployment-rose-higher-in-three-months-of-covid-19-than-it-did-in-two-years-of-the-great-recession/). I'm really kind of tired of this so I'll let those at the CBR make my argument for me. "Within the first 10 days, households spent an average of 29 cents from every dollar received. The bulk of this spending was on food, rent, and bills" (https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/how-effective-were-stimulus-checks-us). Damn so turns out struggling families did need these stimulus checks pretty urgently. Shocker. I also think that most people in finance would agree that tech stocks surged over covid because people needed fucking technology... People built PCs to play video games, used online shopping services because they couldn't go to malls, all that.
The next slide is supposed to support his point that the increase in stock prices doesn't allow young people to find "disruption". What. The only thing that matters to any investor is the percentage increase in value of the stock price after you've invested. It doesn't matter if 7 dollars is 1 share of apple or 0.04 of a share of apple. Its stock price going up by 100% means you get 14 dollars either way. I think this guy's arguments are getting dumber as the talk goes on, I actually had to go and find data to refute his points earlier on. Now arithmetic does the work for me, I should have hired a grade schooler to do my analysis.
His next point is about how algorithmic content selection is bad. Yeah its bad. Its bad for everyone, turns everyone into psychos. Though I think there's a very good argument to be made about how such content could affect developing brains. He makes a point about age-gating social media at the end of the talk. This is actually the only drastic measure he proposes that I agree with so I'll leave this alone too.
After a couple slides about Zuckerberg and TikTok (which I agree with, though I think Zuckerberg's damage probably leans more towards older people than young now), he gives a bunch of graphs showing upward trends in all sorts of terrible things happening to young people. Every single one is an issue of critical importance in the US, but importantly, no comparison to older people. For all we know, the trend on every graph could be the same or even worse for older generations. If I had written about this first then I'd go and find the data for it but at this point I just want to be done with this but can't stop without getting to the end so I'm just gonna slap this slide with lack of comparisons and move on.
His next slide shows the difference in 30 to 34 year olds who have at least one child, some of that is probably due to family planning but I still think its a great indicator of people not wanting to have children because its not affordable. Great point, I believe in it.
Next slide, oh god it's a happiness report. I think happiness reports are a fun conversational tidbit but I see no way for it to be reliable enough to be used as an argument in any semi-serious setting. That said, I have no idea how they do these measurements so maybe I'm wrong.
As if the happiness report wasn't bad enough, Galloway is gonna compare the biggest one-day market cap gain (in an unspecified time frame) to the budget of several policies implemented by the government. Oh man. This is too stupid, there's so many things to pick from it'd take too much effort to sort through them. Someone else please make the argument for me.
Then he says universal basic income should have been called negative income tax. Wow the frequency of good points is going up, though I think this is accompanied by an increase in the frequency of absolutely idiotic arguments.
Then he says we should eliminate capital gains tax deduction. The issue of taxing capital gains is a very serious one, but I don't think it actually matters that much how much we tax realised capital gains. Again, not an expert but here's my understanding. If you have a high net worth with a lot of it in stocks and you need cash, you don't have to sell them and get taxed on the realised gains. You go to the bank and say I want to borrow money, I'm going to put these stocks up as collateral so if I can't pay you back you can take these stocks which are somewhere around the value of the principal amount plus total interest over the course of this loan. Because the bank is now convinced they'll get the money back regardless of if you make the payments or not, they say ok here's the money you asked for at a nice low interest rate. Then you take the money, you keep your stocks, which will probably gain value at a rate that exceeds the interest rate by a pretty decent margin, and you can probably make your interest payments pretty easily because hey, you were rich to begin with. If you're really strapped for cash a couple years down the line, you can sell some of the stocks that are now worth more than they were before and cover your payments and not have to pay taxes on the rest that you don't have to sell. Free money. There's plenty more ways to avoid taxes if you're rich but you get my point by now. Now that's a lot of problems without a solution. Luckily we have some economists far more skilled than I am who work very hard to find solutions to these problems. Here's one example of a policy that may help (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/05/03/opinion/global-billionaires-tax.html). This is an opinion piece written by Gabriel Zucman (famous economist), for the New York Times. If you don't have an NYT subscription, sorry for giving a link you can't read but if you search Gabriel Zucman billionaire tax, you could probably get a decent idea of what this talks about. Here's Zucman tweeting his proposal for his suggestion (https://twitter.com/gabriel\_zucman/status/1763253132572729623). It probably requires a little more thinking than the NYT article but he did present this at the G20 so that might sound more exciting to you than some news article.
Then Galloway says "we need to remove 230 protection for all algorithmically-elevated content". Zero mention on what 230 protection is so here's an explanation (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230). Basically that was a fancy way of saying that companies should be held accountable of the content on their platform, even if it's posted by an unrelated third party. I'm not sure getting rid of it in its entirety is a great idea (though I have no arguments against that except Orwellian ones) but I certainly agree that most if not all social media platforms have abused this protection and it should be at the very least restricted. To what extent? Again, I have no clue.
Then he goes "break up Big Tech". That's the whole suggestion. This is a terrible idea but the fact that he doesn't elaborate more on how to do this, the ramifications of doing so, or really provide any explanation at all makes me automatically ignore this. Then he makes his point about age-gating social media, like I said before, I agree with it.
His next suggestions are universal pre-K, great idea, then "reinstate the expanded child-tax credit". Not sure what he's going on about here, child tax credit exists and like I said before, was just expanded. Then it's income-based affirmative action. I don't know what kind of affirmative action is best and that sounds like an interesting idea so I won't criticise it. I think the rest of his suggestions are pretty normative arguments so I'll leave those alone too.
Don't get me wrong, I wholeheartedly agree with the overall theme of his talk. I believe that young people in the US (and many places worldwide) are at a massive disadvantage when it comes to accumulating wealth, buying homes, inter-generational transfers, etc. But you cannot go up on a popular platform like this, make claims as sweeping as he has, and make suggestions as radical and drastic as he has, with garbage arguments and data like this. Saying the right things for the wrong reasons is arguably worse than just saying the wrong thing because it makes it easy for those who want the status quo to remain to make counterarguments. Given how divisive opinions have become over the past decade or so I guess I shouldn't be surprised at how many people are eating this up but it kinda scares me how easily people will eat up this shit as long as its for a cause that sounds like its going for some kind of radical change for the good of all and has some imaginary "them" as the common enemy to everyone.
So that's it, I've finally covered all his points. I'm free, thank fuck. I should really proofread this but this has been my past eight hours and my back is breaking from all this sitting, I'm just gonna post this and read it over tomorrow. Maybe do a tl;dr, fix some formatting.
EDIT: As u/myphriendmike and u/Mordoci have pointed out, my dummy corp example was just tax fraud, that's illegal and so it's a bad example, I've removed it. Zucman has some estimates on the "real" tax rate wealthy people (mostly billionaires) pay, maybe I'll include that at some point.
I also corrected my wording in some places.

I've seen a ton of posts here asking how specifically to FIRE. Here’s how my wife and I are planning our great escape from the daily grind to retire at 49 years old.
I'll break it down in three easy steps.
But before we start, allow myself to introduce...myself:

• 32 years old
• Making $65,000
• My wife makes $75,000
• Our after-tax monthly income is $9,000
• Our core monthly expenses are:

Housing - $3,000 Groceries - $700 Car - $250 Utilities - $150 Phone - $100 Daycare - $900 Insurance - $500 Travel - $300 Other - $300 Total - $6,200
STEP ONE: What do I need?
To figure out how much money we’ll need in retirement, I looked at our current expenses. $6,200 today would equal about $10,250 when we want to retire, thanks to the devil that is 3% annual inflation.
But usually, when people retire they only spend about 70-80% of their pre-retirement expenses. Let’s say 80% to be safe, so my monthly expenses would be about $8,200 in retirement.
STEP TWO: What's my target?
Now that I know my expenses at the start of retirement will be roughly $8,200, let’s run the numbers to see how much money I’ll need to cover this.
A few assumptions:

• I’ll live till 80
• I’ll leave a buffer of three years of expenses at that time
• We’ll keep our portfolio invested through retirement, and our investments will return 9% per year on average; long-term returns of S&P500 and MSCI World have been higher than this anyway

I plug these numbers into my calculator and find out I need about $1.43 million at 49 years old to cover these expenses.
STEP THREE: How do I get there?
As you may expect, my wife is way smarter than me. She encouraged me to start investing early along with her.
At 23, we had about $15,000 saved from earlier summer jobs and started investing $700 monthly. Now we have $150,000.
To get from $150,000 today at 32 to $1.43 million by 49, I calculate that I'll need to invest $1,550 each month. We can do this.
See? Not that bad.
The keys to retiring early are:

1. Start with what you know - your current expenses
2. Calculate how much you’ll need in retirement - use your current expenses as a starting place
3. Invest early and regularly - the sooner you start and the more consistent you stay, the better off you’ll be

For the math, I just used a financial calculator (free one found here: https://www.calculator.net/finance-calculator.html) but happy to help walk anyone through the steps more granularly.
CLARIFICATION ON CALCULATIONS:
I have no problem staying invested in equities through retirement. I'm fine with volatility. Long-term returns on global equities have been over 9% (https://curvo.eu/backtest/en/market-index/msci-world?currency=usd), so I'm comfortable leaving that at the return target in retirement.
We're investing through tax-advantaged accounts, so we won't have to worry as much about grossing the required income up in retirement.
Calculating $1.43 million through this calculator: https://www.calculator.net/finance-calculator.html
Here are the inputs:
PMT: $8200 [monthly payment in retirement] N: (80-49)*12 [life expectancy - retirement age * 12 month] FV: 300,000 [Buffer I want to leave for age 80] I/Y: 9%-3% [target return - inflation rate]
Under "Settings" P/Y: 12 C/Y: 12
Solve for PV = $1,430,429.66